A Round and a Roundy: The NYPD’s Racially Biased COVID-19 Enforcement Scandal

The mayor and police commissioner keep denying that NYPD officers are systematically carrying out social distancing enforcement in a racially biased manner, but our editorial cartoonist Bill Roundy isn’t buying it.

Try as they might, the mayor and Commissioner Dermot Shea haven’t been able to explain why 90 percent of summonses for failing to socially distance went to blacks and Hispanics. Even as they can’t come up with the right words, they are starting to at least act: the city announced earlier in the week that it would send “ambassadors” rather than cops into parks to encourage people to do the right thing.

So maybe scenes of police aggression like the ones that have exploded on social media — and depicted in the editorial cartoon version above — won’t happen going forward. But for now, Roundy will wait and see (pen poised for next week’s toon).

This week’s bonus cartoon follows Monday’s edition in which Roundy punctured the balloon of hypocrisy surrounding the MTA’s efforts to kick homeless people off the subway.

Brooklyn-based cartoonist Bill Roundy’s prior work for Streetsblog is archived here.